UltrawideUltrawide is a challenging arcade racer built for aggressive, high speed driving through unforgiving tight turns and jumps. Inspired by the breakneck style of hover racing games of the past and way too many hours spent sitting in traffic on the way to work.

This game is about 5 months old now and I finally have it at a place where I could really use some additional eyes and hands on it. This version only includes a single track and car but gives a fairly close representation of how I imagine the gameplay to feel. The game is pretty hard right now and you'll probably fly off the track a bunch of times until the handling starts to make sense. I'm leaning towards adding some guardrails on a few of the turns to keep the frustration level down, it's a bit more punishing right now than I would ultimately like. The playable car in this version is tuned for speed over handling, so it admittedly may not be the best 'starter' vehicle, but, it's more fun to drive fast...

Visually this is about 85% there, audio needs a whole lot of work. Give it a run through, I would love to hear some feedback & impressions and if you can pull it off, under 1:30 runs...

As for the handling of the vehicle, I think the movement speed could be even higher, or possibly put the acceleration on (more of a) curve, so that you can go from 0 to a reasonable speed fairly quickly, and then gradually increase speed over time (I think this is what F-Zero does). I also feel like when the vehicle is making a tight turn, the scraping should slow down its lateral movement (or, if it already does this, then it should do it more). As it is, it's really hard to make tight turns without losing almost all of your momentum.

@Alec S, you're right about the acceleration curve needing work, it's definitely up there on my things to do. I do have a setting in there for adjusting slowdown during turns, I was trying to balance this car's speed against another that handles a lot tighter, but it would probably make sense to revisit those numbers again. Are you accelerating throughout the turns or letting off before and powering out?

@siskavard, I was originally going for f-zero but I'm not sure how much it resembles it anymore.

@nss_aries, probably at some point, I'm just not really set up to test other platforms right now.

@Impmaster, made in Unity

Glad people are digging the visuals too, it's something I constantly stress over.

@Alec S, you're right about the acceleration curve needing work, it's definitely up there on my things to do. I do have a setting in there for adjusting slowdown during turns, I was trying to balance this car's speed against another that handles a lot tighter, but it would probably make sense to revisit those numbers again. Are you accelerating throughout the turns or letting off before and powering out?

Letting off and then powering out. Usually a few turns in my momentum would carry me off the edge before the acceleration could kick in. I think it's the turn that you have in your second animated gif, and from that, it looks like I needed to start my turn a lot earlier to pull it off.

@xerus, right now yes, I've been considering adding brakes to the equation but probably not as the method for initiating drifts. I still prefer flooring it through the turns.

@Alec S, you'll find cutting the corners a bit to be pretty forgiving, so maybe it is just your entry point into the turns like you mentioned. Once you figure out the lines, it's possible to race the entire track without ever letting off the gas. But that's probably a good section for me to test out guard rails in, just to keep things moving

I really like the way it's set up right now as far as control and handling is concerned. The fact that there is no break is rather unique and you should keep it as is.

If I was to change one thing about the controls it might be to add a 'quick switch' type deal when you are drifting, so you quickly switch direction if you hit the opposite direction input.

This game successfully pulls off two important things:

It's fun to watch. Big camera movements and nice aesthetics at work !

It's fun to play. When you get the hang of the controls, pulling off tight corners feels great.

Some things I think you could add (of course, among many things):

Standard arcade game 'boost bonus' at the start if you hit accel at the right time, burnt out if you hit it at the wrong time.

The background needs 'more'. Considering it takes up 50% of the screen 100% of the time, it is rather uninteresting.

I think this particular level should be an 'advanced' level. If you go the route of a campaign, I would start the player off on maps that don't have death drops on 100% of the map. Gradually ease the player in with death drops on a small portion of early maps.

@HD, thanks for the feedback and suggestions. Agreed that this probably isn't the best choice for a starter track, the one I'm sketching out right now is a lot more boxed in.

@Zaphos, good point about the respawn, maybe as a difficulty setting? Either way, I have to rework some code to make that possible, but nothing too crazy.

@nss_aries, I'll give it a shot

I was thinking about the addition of barriers today and want to test out the idea of destructible ones in strategic locations. That way on a missed turn you can hit one and keep the race going, but next time through you lose that safety net.

I remember this game from IndieStatik's Screenshot Scrutiny a few months back. Really happy to see it.

I just tried out the demo. First of all, the game looks great. Really nice art direction - the shapes, colors, fonts, are all consistent and come together well. You've also got the "game feel" down. When the car hits the road and sparks form, it feels very natural and flows very well.

Controls are fun, but definitely really difficult and tricky to get right. I second having a respawn feature. The parts where I keep crashing are the narrow paths right after big turns.

I'm curious how the water is created. Is it a shader that's controlling the up down movement?

Anyway, great work. Can definitely see myself playing this a lot with some pumped up music to go with it.